Google reportedly getting ready to buy HTC

HTC is not having the best of times at present. The smartphone pioneer, who launched one of the world’s first full touch screen smartphones with the O2 XDA PocketPC Phone 15 years ago in 2002, has seen its monthly revenue hitting a 13 year low of NT$3 billion (US$99.69 million) in August.

DigiTimes reports that demand for the company’s latest flagship model, HTC U11, has peaked in July, and shipments have declined sharply in August.

According to the Chinese Commercial Times HTC has entered the final stage of negotiation with Google to buy its smartphone business unit. HTC is expected to ship Google’s  next-generation Pixel smartphones in September.

Google is currently considering either becoming a strategic partner or buying out HTC’s smartphone business. The deal will reportedly not involve the Vive unit or the rest of the company, making it a strong parallel to Google’s purchase of Motorola’s smartphone unit or Microsoft’s purchase of Nokia’s phone division.

HTC, of course, has little relevance currently to Windows Phone fans, but the company has a long history with phones and devices running earlier non-Windows 10 versions of Microsoft’s mobile OS, making its passing into Google’s control a somewhat sad day.

The report is currently unconfirmed and HTC in a statement said that the monthly performance alone could hardly represent the ongoing quarterly trend and that the company is still positive about its overall smartphone shipments for the third quarter of 2017.